For the past six years, I've been a board member for the Pennsylvania Immigration & Citizenship Coalition (PICC). One of the reasons that I got involved with PICC was the ability to do electoral engagement with new citizens. Over the past couple of years, PICC has built a great relationship with the Department of Homeland Security locally, and has been able to register voters at citizenship ceremonies in Philadelphia. PICC is a non-partisan organization, and the fact that they aren't registering voters with a particular agenda has made it possible for them to do this important civic work.

On an otherwise very happy Election Day this year, one dark spot was the mess the city made of processing new registrations and absentee ballots.

This failure went beyond the expected "I thought I registered but I never got a card." I saw many people coming in to the polling place with valid brand new registration cards, mailed to them by the city, only to be nowhere on the voter rolls. Nor on the supplemental rolls, printed out the day before.

Voting provisionally isn't the end of the world, but because in most cases that vote will not be counted it's frustrating for someone excited to cast a vote for the first time.

And then there were the "recieved after Election Day" absentee ballots.

Sure, the City Commissioners office should be reformed. Might be a good topic for the budget talks. But, to fix the voting administration problems, we should look bigger. Project Vote has compiled links to examples of recent public support for a new, federal, way of handling voter registration. The goal would be to have the federal government, rather than individuals or third-party registration drives, be responsible for getting every of-age citizen on the rolls. Look at the arguments below after the break, and let's start advocating for this.

EDIT: Kati says below, "If you are interested in working on election law reform in PA, there is a meeting on Friday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. at the Labor Council office (22 S. 22nd St.) to debrief the election protection efforts of various non-partisan groups, and to begin to strategize about a legislative agenda on election reform in 2009."

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20080726_VA_getting_heat_over_poli...

In short, VA policy forbids voter registration drives in VA facilities. US Rep. Bob Brady, among others, objects to this, as it can potentially disenfranchise the very people who have given the most to serve our country. Much praise to Brady for taking a stand here.

-Z

(I wrote this lengthy, un-organized post as a comment on Zorro’s great diary below; I’m reproducing it here, even longer and possibly less organized, but cleaned up a little.)

What does it say that Obama - out of necessity, some would argue - has put the most work into registering new voters? Some thoughts:

I’d signed up to register people to vote on Easter Sunday. When I walked into the office, the twenty-ish volunteer coordinator immediately said: "How do you feel about doing public housing?" I wanted to say, "Well, I feel like a white, overeducated neophyte with no credibility whatsoever," but instead I said "um, sure." I was paired with a tall, friendly, patient African-American guy who actually owned a car and we drove up to the area directly northeast of the main Temple Campus.

We went around to most of the single-family low-rise projects, and knocked on doors; most folks had already registered either before the election season or more recently at one of the transit-stop or Center City locations, and probably half the people were asking for buttons or signs. The sign-up page on my.barackobama.com had said "Rittenhouse Voter Registration," so I'd shaved and tucked in my collared shirt and put on a nice coat; I'm guessing people mistook me for a Mormon missionary (at best), and I could see their suspicion fading into bemusement when they realized that I was the messenger the Obama campaign had decided to send into their community. We gave away all of our signs in the first fifteen minutes, and kids followed us around yelling "Happy Easter!" and "Barack Obama!" and other exciting things.

After about an hour, we made a hesitant decision to go knock on doors in the high-rise apartments on 11th between Norris and Diamond. Most of the guys hanging around outside the front door waved us off, and we went in to check with the security guard on the front desk. She seemed uneasy, and said "you know, I love Obama, but I'm not sure what you should do." After mulling it over, she decided it couldn't hurt, and told us that a) there was only one working elevator and b) we should forget about taking the stairs.

OK, so I took advantage of not having a con-sulting job today to work doing voter registration for the Obama campaign. I picked up a stack of voter registration forms from the office on Germantown Ave. + Pelham St., + headed to the intersection of Germantown + Chelten Aves. I decided to make the trip more productive by stopping along the way and registering voters as I went. I got 5 people to register even before I got to my destination.

When I got to Chelten, I spoke w/the young man who had a registration table there. I asked how he'd been doing, + he said that he'd been so busy that he was running out of forms; I gave him a handful from my stack, + headed up Chelten to try my luck along that route.